I took Misa Criolla with Jose Carreras, some Opus 3 recordings, John Pfeiffer (Classic Sampler). So basically Jazz and Classic, all very good recordings. "So Nice" - Dianna Krall etc.

Setting of MPDpup the same on both machines.

Finally I asked my wife for her impressions and she basically confirmed what I hear (both with Sotm-card with own linear PSU):

1. Z68 Board with MPDpup: Much, much better than W7/Jriver. The metal can is gone. You finally can listen Music and not to effects / compensations effects.

2. Alix 1d2: Does everything what the Z68 does, but with more liquidity / naturalness and better 3D. A pure Music Machine, eventhough no mods on the motherboard made and PSU is a 8 $ switching PSU.

The combination of Mpdpup + Alix1d2 + Sotm card seems to have a synergistic effect. The sotm card brings you a richer tone, that vibrates more fluently. It unreveals what is possible with Alix and MPDpup. Without you have a very good solution, but not what I would consider "high-end". but for 300$ to jump in the leagues of ultra-high-end....well not a bad deal...

What's next ?

It will take some time, but I will:
- Buy another Alix-Board, mod it to compared to standard (and to have one in stock if mine breaks at some point of time...and there are some friends who wait for testing it themselves)
- Bring the Alix as well onto a lnear PSU
- Try with the same routine Atom-based boards and compare them with Alix...today they loose IP-adress as well...

Thanks Multiblitz, nice to see an apples to apples JRiver comparison - I haven't seen a lot of direct comparisons to the big gorillas of the Windows & Mac world. Did you stick the SOTM card back on the Z68 board for that test, or was it with the stock USB?

I can vouch for the leap in SQ moving from Win 7/JRiver to mpdpup.
I spent a whole load of my life trying to minimise the extraneous guff in Windows not needed for a dedicated music transport, breaking Windows many times in the process and although I improved SQ significantly by so doing, the 5 minute mpdpup install, load GMPC and play with such beautiful SQ so much better, was an eye-opener. Using Atom D510 dual core board and WaveIO USB-S/PDIF converter.

Will never return to Windows!
Actually I am now embarking on tweaking mpdpup! Already gained significantly with kind help from Walter with NRpacks, settings in mpd.conf et al. That's not scratching the surface of what can be achieved, I am sure. Resampling to 32/176.4 has also made great improvement (thanks RayCtech)

Difficult for me to know what Idolse has included/excluded from the Kernel (but whatever it is an excellent result), but I wonder if there is worthwhile mileage in tweaking thread priority and may be turning off any processes in mpdpup not strictly needed (for me anyhow)? My problem is that I know how to do that in Windows but not in Linux.

Resampling to 32/176.4 has also made great improvement (thanks RayCtech)
Jonathan

Does that actually has an effect on the 24bits wavio aswell? I remember reading something about spreading out losses so it was beneficial anyhow? Are you resampling RT or did you upsample your collection offline?

libaudiofile is not the default wav/aiff lib on mpdPup, libsndfile is the default. Most USB audio adapters I've dealt with to date only support s24LE, sounds like some newer ones have implemented 32bit.

If people are curious about libsndfile vs. libaudiofile both are installed. You can toggle between the two with the following commands:

Code:

mpdwizard disable_sndfile
/etc/init.d/20.mpd restart

Code:

mpdwizard disable_audiofile
/etc/init.d/20.mpd restart

Note the sndfile vs. audiofile discussion is only relevant for wav/aiff - other formats will use other decoding libraries.

There is a new stock of Cuboxes, its a new revision with the following changes:
<rabeeh_> Kiranos: the rev2 board is almost identical to rev1, except changed some circuitry for better EMI, FTDI instead of Prolofic usb to serial
<rabeeh_> there is newer features and fixes like SD card-detect, capability of detecting if there is power through the usb to serial, reset functionality and boot select from xmodem also through the FTDI
<rabeeh_> will post on that on the forums and update the wiki accordingly.
<rabeeh_> besides that everything is 100% compatible with REV1.

edbk - "Does that actually has an effect on the 24bits wavio aswell? I remember reading something about spreading out losses so it was beneficial anyhow? Are you resampling RT or did you upsample your collection offline?"

32 bit does work with WaveIO fine. As RayCtec reports earlier, the extra 8 bits although not used in my 24 bit DAC may reduce noise/dither. I also guess that if one used the volume control in mpdpup, that the extra bits may help reduce losses too. That's a guess.

I am resampling in RT, but my dual core Atom D510 board will only successfully do 176.4/32 in 'Medium' SRC not 'Best' - but even in 'Medium' sounds pretty damn good. I am proposing resampling files offline with Sox and testing that against RT sampled files - if only I knew how to do so!

Raytech, would it be possible that you share the image of you optimized system ? I guess i could figure out how to set the right ipadtess of my server etc, but i am not sure how to compile a tuned system as you did

A few off topic posts are ok by me, but I'd rather not have this continue indefinitely. The work you're doing is quite interesting, but since your build isn't based on mpdPup/Puppy Linux at all maybe it's better if you started a thread on DIY Audio or similar to continue the discussion, as it looks like it's going to keep going and I don't want to confuse new users looking at mpdPup.

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